Here’s a quick way to show all available video modes available with your current combination of video driver and physical displays. If you’re hand tweaking /etc/X11/xorg.conf to your liking, you should avoid listing display dimensions that your system doesn’t support. This little tool will let you know exactly what’s available.

If you like sticking explosive crossbow bolts and/or semtex sticky grenades to people and watching or listening to them explode, you should try mastering the Nuketown map. Don your flak jacket and hatchet and go at them, kamikaze style!

his little utility comes with rpm, so it’s already installed and waiting for you. rpm2cpio converts a rpm file specified as as a command argument (or as standard input) and spits it out as a cpio archive to standard output.

If you’ve ever run into a dreaded configure problem such as C compiler cannot create executables, and gotten lost in a tangle of glibc/cc/g++ packages, you might find that building source rpms using Mock turns a multi-step process into a breezy single step. Build source rpms using mock which builds inside a chroot. This lets you compile 32-bit on 64-bit without a problem. Check out mock configurations in etc. You may have preconfigured configurations for your Linux distribution.

Shopt toggles the values of variables controlling optional shell behavior. If you want to match a regular expression while ignoring the case, the easiest method is to use shopt. You can use shopt set, unset, and print out settable options such as the ability to expand aliases and debugging options.

I found a number of simple VBScript’s that relaunch themselves with elevated privileges using the “runas” verb just to launch another application or script. They just do it by re-invoking themselves with a bogus argument just to trigger the else clause the second time through. I don’t like the ampersand and underscore style, so I rewrote it a little less quirky.

Finally, a 64-bit flash player plugin from Adobe. And it’s simple to install too… Go to your browser’s plugin directory, delete the libflashplayer.so or the link to it, then copy in the libflashplayer.so from the tarball you just downloaded.

Here’s how to make GDM stop showing *every* user account at login screen by default. I don’t know why they released gdm with the broken gdmsetup and showing all accounts in the window by default.

Perform an Inception. Mount your iso, then mount the image found inside. Go inside the second image to see what is available during the pre install section of a kickstart. Use isomaster to rebuild the install.img and plop that inside the the outer iso, rebuilding that one too.

In almost all high level languages you can do something similar to x++ to increment an integer counter. Bash doesn’t have an incrementer, but you can still make your own integer counter using back-ticks and expr.